Assistant Professor of MICA , Pooja Thomas has been announced as the recipient of AICTE Dr Pritam Singh Award 2021 for extraordinary teaching in management education. The award will be conferred to her by Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Teacher’s Day in New Delhi.
Thomas conducted workshop-style and discussion-led online sessions which may be difficult in a large classroom environment during Covid pandemic. Thomas who specialises in Cultural Studies, has used Ahmedabad city as a lab for many years now, taking students out to specific key sites and helping them unravel the culture of places.
She used the classroom as platform for the students to test assumptions, worldviews, skills-sets, and to expand knowledge base. She said “my classroom becomes a lab where both student and teacher share equal space decoding cultural objects, popular culture and identifying core values and beliefs”.
She also uses podcasts to enhance the learning experience. “These podcasts are my conversations with academic experts in an easy and accessible manner on new media, listening cultures, food anthropology.
Her initiatives are well appreciated by her students too. Sreeram K V from the 2020-22 batch says, “She always ensured to get even the most indifferent student to contribute something to the class.